History in Belmont Cragin

Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901, and lived the first four years of his life at 2156 North Tripp Avenue.  His father, Elias Disney, moved to Chicago after he married and found work at the Columbian Exposition in 1893.  Elias Disney relocated the family to Missouri when Walt was four, then to Kansas City when Walt was 10, and then back to Chicago when Walt was 16.  Walt Disney began his freshman year at McKinley High School in 1917 and took night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Steinmetz High School (now known as Steinmetz Academic Centre) was founded in 1934 at 3030 North Mobile Avenue and named for Charles Proteus Steinmetz, a German-American electrical engineer and mathematician who suffered from dwarfism, hunchback, and hip dysplasia.  Its most notable alumnus is Hugh Hefner, who served as student council president and who worked on the school newspaper before his graduation in 1944.  According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Hefner led a failed effort to have jukeboxes installed in the school lunchroom.  Other notable alumni of Steinmetz High School include Anthony, Michael, and Victor Spilotro (three notoriously ruthless Chicago mobsters) and Fred Marsh (a utility infielder who bounced around the American League during the 1950s and spent two seasons with the Chicago White Sox).

Between May 1981 and October 1982, various members of a cult of four devil-worshippers known as the “Chicago Rippers" raped, mutilated, and (in most cases) killed a series of local women.  Many of the crimes occurred at the Rip Van Winkle Motel in Villa Park, although one of the killers later confessed that a number of women were abducted and taken to a “satanic chapel” in the upstairs bedroom of the cult’s alleged leader, Robin Gecht, at this 2163 North McVicker Avenue in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood of Chicago.  In a gory and perverted twist, at least one of the breasts of each victim was typically severed with a knife or piano wire.  The cultists would reputedly masturbate on the detached breast and then consume a portion of it.  Thereafter, Gecht would store the remainder of the breast inside some sort of box.  (Ironically, Gecht once worked for serial killer John Gacy.)  One member of the Chicago Rippers, Andrew Kokoraleis, was convicted and executed by lethal injection on March 16, 1999, at Tamms Correctional Center in southern Illinois.  His brother, Thomas Kokoraleis, is serving out a 70-year sentence at the Hill Correctional Center in Galesburg, Illinois.  Ed Spreitzer, the third member of the cult, was sentenced to death, but later became one of the 167 death row inmates to have his sentence commuted by Illinois Governor George H. Ryan on January 11, 2003.   Gecht, the only member of the gang not to confess, is currently serving a life sentence at the Menard Correctional Center in downstate Illinois and is reportedly eligible for parole in 2022.  Interestingly, Gecht’s son, David A. Gecht, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in March 1999 in what was believed to be a gang-related shooting.  He was 18 at the time of his arrest and is currently incarcerated, just like his father.